Green Bank, West Virginia, a tiny town nestled in the Allegheny Mountains, is the subject of Michael J. Gaynors recent piece in Washingtonian, The Town Without Wi-Fi. Green Bank lacks not only Wi-Fi but also cell-phone service and all other signal-emitting technologies, because it is home to a hyper-sensitive telescope whose reception is disturbed by any extraneous electronic noise. As a result, the town has become something of a mecca for electrosensitivesthose who suffer from sometimes debilitating physical symptoms that they attribute to nearby electronic signals. (The condition is controversial, and its causes are as yet unknown.) Many longtime Green Bank residents are resentful of the presence of this unusual community, and of its demands for a further reduction in the towns technology (including the removal of the local churchs fluorescent lights). Gaynor provides a fascinating account of how the increased prevalence of technology in the outside world has affected life in this tech-free bubble.

In the Californian publication Boom, Marta Maretich has written a moving and delicate essay about the passage of time in another townBakersfield, California, where she grew up. Maretich writes about the experience of going back to Bakersfield to clean out her parents old house after many years of living in Europe. She is struck particularly by the evolution of the once folksy local dump into a full-scale landfill. She reconnects with old friends and neighbors and meditates on the things that change and the things that stay the same, while observing the movement of objects through our lives.

The latest installment in Politicos profile series is Glenn Thrushs piece on the newly reelected Speaker of the House, John Boehner, which bears the grim title The Prisoner of Capitol Hill. Through surprisingly frank interviews with Boehner and other D.C. insiders, Thrush depicts the treacherous political terrain that Boehner must navigateunable to please the far-right members of his own party, on the one hand, and unable to achieve compromises across the aisle on the other. But the Speaker seems to approach this intractable situation with what Thrush calls a nicotine-induced zen. I dont do angry, Boehner says, chain-smoking his way through the halls of power and into another term of what, Thrush writes, is a job so thankless that its hard to see why anyone would want it.

In the Guardian, Tobias Jones writes about the 2010 murder of a thirteen-year-old girl in Italy, and the extraordinarily complicated and fraught investigation that has followed. Yara Gambirasio left her home one November evening to meet her gymnastics instructor at a gym near her house. She never returned, and her body was found three months later. With no immediately plausible suspects, the police threw a wide net, taking thousands of DNA samples from people who might have been in the area at the time. Eventually they found a close match, but, rather than cracking the case, the DNA evidence complicated things furthergeneticists believed that the man whose DNA raised the alarm had to be the brother of the killer, but none of his known siblings was a perfect match either. So the investigators were left to untangle a web of relationships and secrets stretching back decades to try to discover who the missing sibling, and the killer, might be.

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Weekend Reading: A Tech-Free Town, Boehners Zen, and More